Thank God I Didn’t Become A Train Engineer

I’ve loved trains since I was a little kid. I’ve always had a train set(the title pic is from my current layout), I hung out by the tracks a rail served industry in my hometown, getting cab and caboose rides. As a ten year old, I wrote to the Santa Fe Railway and got a tour of their downtown Chicago headquarters. I know many people in the industry now, and have known people in the rail industry from the very bottom to CEOs of Class I railroads. I’ve gotten cab rides in steam engines, and I can look at any train, tell you the horsepower of the locomotives, their relative age, and identify any freight car today and what it hauls. I know more about railroads than 95% of the public.

I have driven a truck for 21 years now, and even today, I would still love to be a train engineer. But because of my knowledge of railroading, I never did it. I knew what railroading was, and the life that came with it. As much as I loved train, THANK GOD I DID NOT BECOME A RAILROAD WORKER.

When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, railroading paid WELL. All of the workers were on call all of the time, and they had to be at work within 90 minutes of being called, but the sacrifices you made were at least well paid for. You were on call 24/7/365, but back then, you could get around 5–7 days off a month, more if you had enough seniority to hold a regular(semi scheduled) bid job. The retirement was great, Railroad Retirement, even today, is still one of the best retirement plans in the country.

But getting a permanent job in railroading is hard, and it ALWAYS has been. You would get hired and trained as a trainmen, but the likely hood of staying on full time was low, railroads are notorious for “cutting off”(laying off) workers at the drop of a hat, and it is ROUTINE. You would work for a while, be told you were “cut off,” then decide if you wanted to draw unemployment or if you needed to find a new job. You had recall rights, but those were immediate recall rights, which meant if they called you back to work and you had gotten another job, you had to decide, almost on the phone, whether to go back to the railroad or stay where you were. There was also no guarantee how long you would stay once you were called back, it could literally be for less than a month before you were cut off again for another unknown length of time.

I went into the Navy two weeks out of high school, I was 17 when I went to boot camp. I was a jet mechanic in the Navy, I got out when I was 21 and got a pretty good job doing heavy maintenance and rework on commercial aircraft. This was a pretty good job until September 11, 2001, when most of aviation, and most of the country, including the railroads, got laid off. This is how I ended up driving a truck, it was pretty much the only profession at the time that was hiring(its always hiring), and if you have read any of my other articles, you know why there is always a “driver shortage.” Railroading wasn’t an option for me when I changed careers, and wasn’t until I already had a pretty decent trucking job. Until the past ten years or so, I have always considered going into railroading.

But again, I knew what it was, and decided not to go into it. As crappy as my no scheduled life is driving a truck, it looks like a 9–5 Monday through Friday job compared to railroading. I have been a local(home daily) driver most of my trucking career, this is a luxury railroaders don’t have. While I have no set hours, I am not on call 24/7/365, I’m going to be off on major holidays, and I can schedule a day off if I need it.

To compare this to railroading today, when I say you have to be at work within 90 minutes of call time, this is EXACTLY what I mean. This means that everything you do when you are on call means that you have to be within a 90 minute radius of being at work. This means you can’t go to a movie, doctor’s appointment, or shopping trip. This means that you will not likely see your family in any meaningful way, and you had better be sleeping the few hours you’re off, because the chances of you getting called back are nearly 100%. You are chained to the phone, and have to be ready to go at any time, literally at 90 minutes notice.

And while railroading used to pay really well, it doesn’t anymore. If you have seen railroad CEOs, who make tens of millions a year, saying railroaders average 135K a year, this is a laughable stat, I know many railroaders who don’t make anywhere near that(many railroad jobs don’t pay overtime, but mine does). I have literally done the math, and at my current job driving a truck, if I was working the hours many railroaders are, I would EASILY make 135K, and have far MORE of a life.

To make things even worse, around 2015, railroads started with a new program called “Precision Scheduled Railroading(PSR),” and ALL the major railroads(there are ONLY 7 Class I railroads in America, soon to be six) have gone to it, whether they will admit to it or not. There is nothing “precision” or “scheduled” about it. All it means is that railroads have laid off 1/3 of their workers since 2015, and yes, you read that right, railroads have laid off 1/3 of their workforce since 2015, cut service and do away with “marginally profitable” lines, sell every piece of equipment you can, raise rates on the freight you have left, and run employees into the ground. Also, there is literally NO scheduling to it, on time rail deliveries have dramatically DROPPED since these policies were instituted.

To put this in more simple terms, PSR is basically cutting service to customers, drive employees into the ground, create a “rail shortage,” and then massively raise rates on the few customers you have left, who literally can’t exist without rail service. It is MASSIVELY PROFITABLE for railroads, until the system collapses, which is where it’s at now.

When Covid first hit and the country shut down, railroads used the excuse for massive layoffs, even though, like trucking, they were “essential” employees. But as I have stated in this article, railroading does NOT pay anywhere near as well as it did ten or twenty years ago, and railroad executives in their unending greed to load up their own pockets with money, failed to realize that when railroading doesn’t pay well, railroaders have a LOT more options when they get laid off. They find decent, and in many cases, BETTER PAYING jobs where they are home everyday or nearly everyday and are not on call 24/7/365. Even though railroads are union, they are under the Railway Labor Act(RLA), which(very basic summary), railroaders CANNOT strike, they have multiple layers of semi forced arbitration they have to go through before they can even begin to discuss a strike, and the railroads refuse to bargain with them anyway, which is why the railroaders have had no contract and no raise in three years. The industry has now gone through all the forced arbitration garbage it has to, and is now under a “Presidential Emergency Board,” part of the RLA, which is the LAST step before a strike, which means if both sides don’t agree on a contract in less than 90 days, a strike is likely, and well deserved.

But the RLA CANNOT keep people from outright quitting, which they have done in droves. BNSF, the railroad I would have most likely worked for, at the beginning of the year, instituted what was called a “Hi Viz” attendance policy, which DRAMATICALLY changed how much time off and how much time on call their workers were on. How did they do this with a union contract? Because of the RLA, BNSF sued the union, and got a federal court to say this was a “minor,” issue, so BNSF got their way, and ALL the other railroads were watching. BNSF got exactly what they wanted, or so they thought……

If you want a basic idea of what “Hi Viz” was, it meant you were on call 24/7/365, and because BNSF had laid off so many workers, you would likely work 12 on(more like 17 or 18 on by the time you got to a hotel/home), and the SECOND you had your minimum rest time(8 hours), you would be back at work. Under this policy, BNSF supposedly “guaranteed” workers ONE day a month off, but they would NOT tell you when that day was, and the worker may not have even known when that day was, they were still on call. Employees quit IN DROVES, and the full “Hi Viz” policy only lasted a few months before BNSF relaxed it some, but its still FAR WORSE than what they had previously. Even though ALL the railroads are hiring, their on call policies are so bad that few of the workers stay(especially BNSF), and the ones who do stay will likely get cut off at some point in the future, and their return when called back is questionable at best, many of them most likely will NOT return.

Railroading used to be a great job, passed down for generations, the best recruiting tools railroads had were family members and kids of current railroaders. Even though the life was hard, it provided great wages, benefits, and retirement. While the retirement is still great, the wages and benefits aren’t, and the children of railroad worker will NEVER be railroad workers because their parents were gone almost all the time. The families know what the life is like, and they refuse to join it.

This is what railroading has become. Farmers can’t get fertilizer to plant their crops, and can’t ship them out at harvest, there are no crews to run the trains. Power plants are afraid they will run out of coal. Containers are stacking up at ports that are already at capacity, because there are no crews to move the trains, and/or the railroads sold off so much equipment that they have no power to move it, or a combination of both. And NOTHING will change, because even with all the damage these policies have done, railroads are making RECORD PROFITS, and they want more. Sorry if the farmers can’t plant or harvest, sorry if the lights went out and store shelves are empty, we only have enough crews to run the highest value freight, which we charge a premium for, and because of the self caused “shortage” of workers and equipment we caused, we can then charge even MORE of a premium, we can do far less, and make far more.

Many railroad workers see this “worker shortage” as the opening shot in letting trains become autonomous, the president of CSX even came out and said all of the “crew shortage” problems would be eliminated if they could go to one man crews. This is another line the industry is putting out. If we automated ALL of railroading today, the railroads would say “we don’t have enough robots,” and “robots are too expensive to run,” just like it’s “too expensive to pay employees.” The real problem here is the SAME problem that exists everywhere else in the supply chain, and that is the more the transportation services can be constrained, the more these services can charge due to “shortages.”

No matter what the railroads say, they will NOT be able to hire enough workers in the future to solve the problem. If I believed they wanted to solve the problem, and I do NOT believe they do, because solving the problem will likely LOWER their profits. The railroad industry has run off its best recruiting tools, which was families and people like myself. I read in one of my railroad groups the other day that the only people left in railroading are those who have 15–25 years in, which means they would lose massive amounts in their retirement if they quit, as you have to work for a railroad to be in railroad retirement. At 15–25 years(and I would likely be in this window of time if I had worked for the railroad), your career should be starting to pay off, this is the point where you have enough seniority to hold semi regular jobs. Now that is all out the window, since they railroads are so short on crews(and mechanics, dispatchers, maintenance of way, ALL crafts), ALL of them are working 24/7/365, and it is NOT worth the pay. New hires see this IMMEDIATELY, and QUIT, nearly immediately. It will NOT change.

If you want an idea of what railroaders make, it’s around $30ish an hour(some more, some less depending on how long they have been employed) is NOT worth having your life controlled 24/7/365. While a person CAN make $135K a year at $30ish an hour, it takes a TON of hours to do it, and there are a LOT of jobs that pay close to that money, with far more regular hours, and regular days off. If railroads want to have enough workers to handle the work they have, $30ish an hour will NOT cut it to be on call 24/7/365. As someone who makes less than $30 an hour(not much less), you would have to triple my pay for me to even begin to consider this type of lifestyle, and other than OTR trucking(which pays far LESS than $30 an hour), there is no other industry that even begins to compare to the hours that the average railroaders are working. And like OTR trucking, railroads are having massive hiring/retention problems, and at these wages and work rules, they ALWAYS WILL.

I made the RIGHT choice by NOT working for the railroad, and many others are making the RIGHT choice by NOT doing it as well. The crew shortages and manpower shortages are PERMANENT, and will only get WORSE, as these strategies lead to RECORD PROFITS. There is no “fix” coming. The “fix” is empty shelves, and higher costs for everything that rail hauls. The “shortage” is a license to print more money, it will NOT change., and it will NOT change anywhere else in the supply chain until it is forced to.

Now I will go work on my train set. Building a train set is far more rewarding than a career in rail that I still would love to do, but know full well, it is NOT worth it.